On this crisp October morning, it seems as if half the Internet is dealing with a hangover. A serious outage of Amazon Web Services took down many, many websites, apps, games, and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running. That includes a long list of popular software like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva, and fortnite. Even Amazon’s own assistant, Alexa, has been stuttering, and if you’re wondering why the internet seems to be against you today, you’re missing the point.
However, now there is good news. As of approximately 4:30 pm ET today (October 20), things appear to be returning to normal. Apps like Venmo and Lyft, which previously responded slowly or not at all, seem to behave just fine.
However, as of 1:15 p.m. ET, several services were unavailable, including asking Alexa about the weather or turning off the lights in your house. The Lyft app also took longer to respond than usual and Venmo transactions were not completing.
According to the AWS Service Status PageAmazon was investigating “increases in error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (that is, data centers in Northern Virginia) at 3:11 a.m. ET on Monday. By 5:01 a.m., AWS had discovered that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that contains information for AWS customers.
At approximately 12:08 pm ET, the company published a small statement which reiterated the above and added that “the underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 am PDT.” According to the advisory, some Amazon customers “still continue to experience increased failure rates with AWS services in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) region due to issues launching new EC2 instances.” Amazon also said that Amazon.com and Amazon subsidiaries, as well as AWS customer service support operations, have been affected.
“Amazon had the data stored securely, but no one else could find it for several hours, leaving the apps temporarily separated from their data,” said Mike Chapple, professor of IT, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame. cnn. “It’s as if large portions of the Internet are suffering from temporary amnesia.”
At 6:35 a.m., AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and that “most AWS service operations are succeeding normally now.” However, the domino effect caused problems with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.
At 8:48 a.m., AWS said it was “making progress in resolving the issue with the launch of new EC2 instances in the US EAST-1 region.” He recommended that customers not tie new deployments to specific availability zones (that is, one or more data centers in a given region) “so that EC2 has flexibility” in choosing a zone that may be a better option.
At 9:42 a.m., Amazon noted on the status page that although it had applied “multiple mitigations” across several availability zones in US-EAST-1, it was “still experiencing high errors for launches of new EC2 instances.” As such, AWS was “limiting the pace of new instance launches to aid recovery.” The company added at 10:14 a.m. that it was seeing “major API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region.” Even once all the issues are resolved, AWS will have a significant backlog of requests and other factors to process, so it will take some time for everything to recover.
Many, many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, so it seemed like half the Internet was offline on Monday morning. By mid-morning, tons of websites and other services were slow or offering error messages. Reports of outages for a wide range of services increased on Down Detector. In addition to Amazon’s own services, users reported problems with banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, fortnite, roblox and The New York Times — sorry to anyone whose word Stingrays may be at risk.
Sites like Reddit have published their own status updatesand while they don’t explicitly mention AWS, it’s possible that the services’ paths intersect somewhere in the pipelines.
AWS offers many useful features to customers, such as the ability for websites and applications to automatically scale compute and server capacity up and down as needed to handle the ebbs and flows of traffic. It also has data centers around the world. That type of infrastructure is attractive to companies that serve a global audience and need to stay online 24 hours a day. By mid-2025, it was My dear that AWS’s share of the global cloud infrastructure market was 30 percent. But incidents like this highlight that relying on a few providers to be the backbone of much of the Internet is a problem.
Update, October 20, 2025, 10:57 am ET: This story has been updated to include a brief list of affected services in the introduction.
Update, October 20, 2025, 11:17 am ET: This story has been updated to include a reference to Reddit’s status update website.
Update, October 20, 2025, 1:15 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a paragraph reflecting on the state of popular services like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, based on our editors’ personal experiences up to this point.
Update, October 20, 2025, 3:15 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a brief statement from Amazon outlining a timeline of events, when the underlying issue was mitigated, and which parts of Amazon were affected.
Update, October 20, 2025, 4:30 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the status of services like Venmo and Lyft as of Monday afternoon.
